The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

by Marilyn Johnson

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 252
Rating:

Synopsis:

Every morning, countless readers of the morning papers bypass the front page, neglect the sports section, and go directly to the obituary page. It's not morbid curiosity (or not just that) that motivates them. Legions of obsessive fans turn to the obit page first because it very often contains the most gripping and best-told stories of the day.

In The Dead Beat, former Life magazine writer and Esquire editor Marilyn Johnson makes a smart and light-hearted survey of obituary writing, unraveling the cult and culture of obituaries to consider what our feelings about death--and the way we write about it--tell us about how we live.

Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries was a random pick for me; I’m not sure where I heard about it or why I added it to my Kobo via Kobo Plus, but it did sound kinda tempting to understand something that other people apparently get fannish about (ghoulish as that might sound).

I’m not quite sure what I hoped for, but maybe a bit more of a focus on obituaries, rather than on the people who write and obsess over them. There are parts I found interesting, discussing the development of obituary fashions (that’s not really quite the right term, but it works well enough), like the trend for “ordinary Joe” obituaries highlighting ordinary members of a community rather than just obituaries of famous people… but a lot of it was about Johnson getting fannish over meeting prominent/skilled/trend-setting obituarists. I ended up getting a bit bored of that, because I didn’t know who these people were or why their work was so good, other than that Johnson said so. There were snippets included, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel equally fannish — perhaps just because it’s not my interest.

Overall, I guess it kind of overstayed its welcome with me, but I’m glad I gave it a shot, all the same; it’s a bit of a random topic, I suppose, but I always enjoy learning about apparently random topics. I did enjoy little snippets of info, like the fact that Reagan died during the annual conference for obituary writers, which somewhat stymied them in writing his obituary…

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)